The Home Depot — Local services in Niagara Falls

A store from hell. My saga with Home Depot is long enough for a movie, a very sad one. We just bought a house in Niagara Falls and well ahead prior to our move we put about 25 items in our shopping cart on their site. Easy? You'd think so. All we needed was to specify the date for the delivery, we were moving in in early June and needed all of these items to be there after we moved in, not before. Thats where the unforeseen "troubles" started: some of the items in our cart wanted to be delivered "tomorrow" only and the option to specify the date while available did not produce the expected result (buttons greyed out, dead end). A call to the helpline ended up useless as well: after the staffer manually (!) re-entered all of our items to her order, she experienced the same inability to ship at the desired date. That took an hour on the phone. Perplexing, including the fact that she couldn't just grab our items out of a created cart in an existing account. Her suggestion was to visit a physical store (something we wanted to avoid due to the lack of time) -- and have them put together an order. That was a fiasco as well, a store in Toronto told us they can't ship to Niagara and they have no access to a warehouse that could process such an easy task either. Mindboggling. We ended up paying the local store in Niagara multiple visits after our move (again, something we did not have the time for) to collect the items we needed. Add insult to the injury, on Wednesday I decided to give online ordering another try for two relatively large items: a lawn mover and a 6ft ladder. That order went "well" -- my card got charged, and I did receive a lawn mover on Friday (thats two days after the order) -- considerably better than the last time I tried ordering it, when a day and a half after I suddenly got an email from them informing me that my order was cancelled. I did not cancel the order and there were plenty of these lawnmowers on the floor of the store as I saw them personally, I just don't have the car big enough. As for the ladder -- anyone's guess. It is Friday eve and I don't have my ladder, still. I have an email from them saying it was sent by Day and Rose, but tracking info is all but impossible to get out of Days and Rose. I'd be perhaps willing to accept these multiple screwups if I was dealing with a steep discounter offering rock bottom low prices, if I was saving on these purchases. In reality Home Depot is more like a "premium" store by way of pretty high prices on everything they sell, no particular discounts, no bonus points, nothing by way of any benefits for their customers. It is a huge monopoly-like company that just doesn't care about the end customer well enough to travel the customer journeys I encountered and fix the errors. Because of their enormous footprint they obviously dont feel the need to care. As a result, I will make an effort to avoid shopping there as much as possible, there are other stores, like Rona (much better pricing) and others. Newsflash: we live in an era when things you order online do arrive the next day, if not the same day, as often is the case, and thats just the way that better retailers are operating. Home Depot needs a major wake up call to either get on with the program or continue being a store from soviet hell -- but that will not end well for them,...

I ordered three items from this Home Depot. One of them was cancelled because it was “out of stock,” even though the website clearly showed it as available when I placed my order. Nobody contacted me to offer a replacement, even though there were the same items in other colours.

As soon as I got the email that one item was unavailable, I immediately called Home Depot to ask if they could simply replace it with a different colour. I waited on the phone line for 45 minutes, but nobody ever answered. Meanwhile, my delivery was already completed without the missing item.

I am disabled and do not drive. Now, in order to get that one item, I either have to pay for a taxi, which is very expensive, or place a separate order with another delivery fee. Home Depot completely disregarded me as a customer.

This was my very first experience using Home Depot delivery, and it will absolutely be my last. The repeated message while I was stuck on hold, telling me “your call is important to us,” felt like a cruel joke. If my call had been important, someone would have answered in less than 45 minutes.

I will never order from this store again.

Day two: The Limit of Absurdity (or, Welcome to the Looking-Glass World)

Yesterday, when I submitted my complaint, I was asked in the reply to provide feedback. Unfortunately, I did not have time to share the information at that moment.

Today, while I was at work around 11:30 a.m., I received a phone call. A man said, “I am here.” I asked, “Who is here?” He answered, “Home Depot, delivery.” I said, “But that was yesterday.” He replied, “Where to leave it?” I then told him to leave it (what?!) near the side door.

Now here is the issue: Home Depot did not contact me at all—no phone call, no message, no email—to let me know that today there would be another delivery. From the very beginning, I ordered two storage containers and I wanted them with lids of different colours. Home Depot could not have known that the second container had to be a different colour unless they contacted me. That is why communication was crucial. Instead of reaching out to clarify what substitution I would prefer, they unilaterally decided to send another container and, without any notice, delivered it while nobody was at home.

As a result, I now have two identical containers with orange lids (as confirmed by the delivery service picture), which defeats the purpose of my order. This demonstrates a serious communication failure between the store and the customer. It is completely unreasonable and even absurd. To make matters worse, since I left for work at 8:00 a.m. and will not return before 9:00 p.m., the container will be sitting outside my door the entire day. I have no idea whether it will still be there when I come home. Instead of solving the problem, Home Depot simply...

My hubby sent me there to get some items. He printed them out from their website and they all showed in stock. This particular item showed 28 were in stock in this Niagara Falls location as you can see in the photos. We just moved to Fort Erie and had been shopping at Homedepot St. Catharines before and loved the staff there. So Niagara Falls location is new to us but left very bad experiences for us and today's experience topped them all. Once I got to the store, they only have 1 for this item that is showing 28 in stock on their website and we need 4 of them. I asked to speak to the manager and questioned why on their website it showed 28 but in the store, there is only 1. This manager by the name Michael told me that they are still in trucks and not really on the floor so I have to go home and come back. I said we checked the availability before I came just to make sure that I am not wasting my trip since it is an hour drive back and forth from where we live. If the in stock availability is not the actual items on the floor then it should not be shown on the website misleading the customers. The manager said eventhough there are 28 in stock showing on the website but doesn't mean that they are available for purchasing. There is nothing that he can do. And that is all that he said to me. At that point I was upset at his bad customer service because it is like I am talking to a dead wall. For me when 28 showing in stock on their website means that 28 are available and ready for purchase. I will not discuss how rude and terribly they treated me afterwards because I filed a ticket to their...